The Worker Speaks

What do U.S. industrial workers really think about their companies and unions?

The Rev. Theodore V. Purcell, a Jesuit and assistant professor of industrial relations at Chicago's Loyola University, set out in 1949 to get answers to the question from the workers themselves. With the cooperation of both company and union, he spent 44 months talking to Swift & Co. meat-packing workers in Chicago's Pack-ingtown. Father Purcell became known as "the Packinghouse Padre" and (from wearing a white coat to meet sanitation rules) "the White-Frocked Priest."

Last week the Packinghouse Padre's findings reached bookstores in a notable 344-page study entitled The Worker Speaks His Mind on Company and Union (Harvard University Press; $6). Writes the author:

"I went among them in a double capacity, as both psychologist and priest [and in] a position of neutrality between company and union . . . Almost all of them relaxed and spoke freely once we were under way . . . For some of the workers it was perhaps the first time in their lives that they talked extensively to one who valued their opinions and simply listened." Dual Allegiance. The workers' No. i want, the listener learned, was steady work, without layoffs or cuts in hours or pay. Next to dependable income, what the workers wanted most was to be treated with dignity--not bossed around. Time and again they denned a good foreman as one who "leaves us alone" and who "listens to you."

Father Purcell soon found that, for satisfaction of their wants and easing of their fears, most workers looked neither to the company alone nor to the union alone, but to both company and union. This "dual allegiance," as he calls it, was Father Purcell's principal discovery.

Farewell to Beasts. "Company allegiance is a fact," writes Father Purcell. In a sample of 202 workers, 187, or 92%, showed more or less "favorable" attitudes toward Swift & Co., a great change since Upton Sinclair wrote in sorrow and anger (in The Jungle, 1906) about the company-hating "human beasts" in the Pack-ingtown jungle. Of the rest, 14 were neutral; only one man's attitude was downright "unfavorable."

The main reasons workers gave for liking Swift & Co. were that it provided steady work, took good care of the sick and aged. That workers expressed allegiance to Swift & Co. did not mean that they really liked their jobs or had no grievances. Positive "pride of work" was uncommon, Father Purcell found. Exceptional was the man who said: "I got one of the toughest jobs in the soap house. Work with lye. They say I'm one of the only ones who can do it . . . See these scars on my arms . . . ? I'm interested in my work."

Many Negro employees complained that Swift did not give them an even chance with whites to climb to better jobs. Both Negroes and whites disliked the bonus plan under which Swift pays employees extra for output above "normal" standards. Only 16% said they wanted to see the system abolished, but an additional 55% viewed it with mistrust. ("They put it in a book, and only they have the book"). One trouble was that many workers did not understand how the plan operated ("It's bad! Like on my job--you can't hardly figure it out"). Father Purcell decided that "the worker does not like to be taken for a machine tool."

Spare the Goose. "Union allegiance is not so pronounced as company allegiance, but it is there." The workers' quarrel, Father Purcell found, was not with the union idea, but with the leadership of their particular unit (Local 28 of the C.I.O. United Packinghouse Workers of America). Only 26% revealed favorable attitudes toward the leaders, and 47% were positively hostile, largely because of the local's record of left-wing tendencies and a strike in 1948 that many rank & filers opposed.

In his 2O2-worker sample, Father Purcell found that 73% had more or less positive (though not equal) allegiance to both company and union. This great majority felt strongly that both were necessary to their welfare. They wanted company and union to get along. One of their commonest fears was that too much militancy on one side or the other would kill the egg-laying goose or break up the union.

The Way of Harmony. The lesson Father Purcell draws is that worker allegiance is not a cake that company and union divide, with one side's gain being the other side's loss. It is to the interest of both sides, says Father Purcell, to nurture "dual allegiance." The company should accept the union as "a good and even necessary institution." The union should "view the company as a partner, and not as an enemy or a threat."

Workers in Packingtown, concludes the Packinghouse Padre, "have told us in their own words that dual allegiance is something they have, something they want, something that must not be threatened. They [desire] harmony and cooperation in the plant community. And so ... the great social upheavals of our time need not mean the disintegration of our modern society."

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